Holiday Promotion Video
Video 1
This is a super valuable holiday promo planning session I held a few years back for a special group of creatives in one of my high-end coaching groups. The principles and the planning process you see here are the same way I do things now, so nothing has changed. When I use the word "fan" - just interchange it with the word "potential customer" or "customer".
You will see here a number of mini-campaigns here all within Q4. The idea here is to maximize your revenue as much as possible in the highest consumer-spending quarter.
So we're using the holidays as an "excuse" to hold different promos that start and end but are all very similar, we're just calling them different things.
WARNING: please be VERY careful about offering free shipping. In fact, I would like to dissuade you from using this at all. Most students here do not know their true profit margins, and you will likely EAT all your profit if you offer free shipping. So you might want to come up with a different promo plan in its place, such as a free gift with purchase (something with a high perceived value that doesn't actually cost you much).
Possible mini-campaigns you can run:
- Black Friday, Cyber Monday (BFCM)
- Welcome the holidays
- Free Gift with Purchase
- Gift cards for last-minute Christmas purchases
- Repeat Buyer promo
- End of Year/New Years sale
Important Takeaways:
- Choose your maximum discount
- Know your profit margins!
- Set up a landing page for people to opt-in who WANT the special promos -- get them on your early bird/VIP list.
- Your existing VIP subscribers will automatically get these promos -- make sure you communicate this so they KNOW this.
- Consider giving your early birds/VIPs a 24-48 hour head start.
- DO still send the promos to the rest of your list.
- Use a project manager to track all your tasks (see download below for a checklist!).
- Here's a copy of the Airtable base I was using in the video. This is read-only, but you should be able to make a copy. The big to-do list is no longer active here, but it may help you with visualization.
- Use your content pillars in your emails -- you don't need to hard-sell in every email. Some emails should hard-sell, but some should be great content + a P.S. at the end. Example: "P.S. Want to get early access to our black Friday deals? Make sure to sign up!"
- Plan any list-building ad campaigns to run BEFORE these sales begin. Once it gets close to BFCM, 1) you've already missed the boat, and 2) ad costs go up significantly with all the competition!
- Start running ads to your WARM audiences about becoming VIPs or early birds for your sales a few weeks before it starts!
- Start sending emails to your existing list to become an early bird or VIP 7-14 days before your sales begin -- and send more than one! I'd send at least 3.
- Make sure you have a specific TAG created in your CRM specifically for this sale if you aren't utilizing a general VIP program/tag. Name it something like "2021 Q4 Earlybirds" or something that will indicate exactly who these people are and what they signed up for. That way you can also EXCLUDE them from any emails that they don't need to get.
Video 2
Example:
Here's an example of what our spreadsheet looks like for all the emails we're writing. Our social posts will mirror this schedule and content.
Here's an example of what our dashboard looked like as we were beginning to flesh it out:
Downloads:
Here's your workbook (as shown in the video). You can type right into the doc if you like, or print it out if you're a pen & paper person.